The power and the glory of ancient
Greece

One of the cardinal rules of theatre criticism
states that the further a reviewer travels to see a show, the more likely he is
to file a rave review. He does, after all. have to justify the trip.

Reports of Peter Hall's productuion of
Sophocles's Oedipus Plays in the magical ancient theatre at Epidaurus in
Greece earlier this month were largely ecstatic. Now the plays have returned to
the National Theatre's Olivier auditorium (whose design is actually based on
Epidaurus). How do they come across, now they are deprived of chirruping
cicadas and a moon rising in the warm Greek night?

Moving and impressive are the words that spring
to mind, though it would be wrong to pretend that this is an easy evening.
What's remarkable, however, is that these two plays, strange and alien in many
ways, are still capable of speaking so directly, and so affectingly, to a
modern audience 2,500 years after they were written.

Hall, an old hand at Greek drama, once again
stages them in full face masks, and describes the importance of the mask with
evangelical fervour. Hall's view is that the mask helps contain the terrible
emotion of Greek tragedy, and render it acceptable. I'm not entirely convinced.
Audiences can cope with the blinding of Gloucester and the relentless suffering
of Lear without the distancing device of masks. Why should they not also be
able to experience the agony of Oedipus without facial protection?

In my view, Greek tragedy can work superbly
without masks, but here is no doubt that Hall's approach works too. The
sudden moments when rigid formality gives way to recognisable human emotion -
most powerfully demonstrated here as the blinded Oedipus's voice suddenly
cracks when he thinks of his poor daughters who are also his sisters - can
create an explosive theatrical charge.

The plot of Oedipus the King still
shocks despite its familiarity. Not only does it unsparingly depict the malign,
remorseless working of fate, it is also the world's first (and best) detective
story, with the hero doggedly hunting a villain only to discover that it is he
who has committed the crime. The oppressive sense of an individual trapped and
destroyed by what Cocteau called an infernal machine is at once dramatically
thrilling and spiritually terrifying. After this, the sense of release in the
second play, Oedipus at Colonus, as the hero finally dies without pain,
achieves a genuine sense of relief.

Alan Howard's amazing actor-laddie voice can
seem mannered in modern work, but its range and beauty are superbly deployed
here, at times putting one in mind of a rich resonant cello, at others of a
rapt, plangent oboe. The skill with which he pilots his way through yard after
yard of verse, apparently without pausing for breath is, well,
breathtaking.

Others fare less well - is it necessary for
Greg Hicks's Tiresias to perform a ludicrous belly dance as he slurps down the
verse like a greedy wine connoisseur? - and Ranjit Bolt's translation, in
rhyming couplets, is sometimes distractingly colloquial, lacking the rough-hewn
rhythmic intensity of Tony Harrison's superb version of The
Oresteia.

The design by Dionysis Fotopolous has a grand
simplicity, and the large Chorus move and speak with splendid precision, a
multi-limbed, multi-voiced creature that comes together and moves apart like
some mysterious natural organism.

It would be futile to pretend there aren't
longueurs in Oedipus's terrible journey, but the cumulative power of the two
plays, the sense that we have been forced to contemplate the human condition in
its rawest state, is unmistakable.